Joanna Scanlan talks about playing D.I. Vivienne Deering...

Deering is in the prime of her life. She has a fabulously important job in the police service. She's a great Detective Inspector, she has a great team and she leads them well. She has achieved a lot in her life, and still has the drive and intelligence to be able to imagine a great future.

She runs her team with quite tight and personal leadership. She's good with the pep talks - her style is not dissimilar to a manager of a football club. She gets them together, she talks to them, she massages them. Deering gives the one a kick who needs a kick, and she gives the one that needs the stroke, the stroke. She's good at sussing who needs what when, and keeping them in line. She defends them and protects them from the people above who have a different set of police values from her. She has a bulldog on her desk and there is something of the bulldog in the way she goes about her job.

She instinctively feels that in modern policing, in the process of everything going through the information technology mincer, we are losing the human, instinctive, visceral side of police work. Deering learned the job at her father's knee. He was a serious police player and she trusts her own instincts. If everything is just number crunched, something is going to get lost.

There's a sense in Deering that she went into a male preserve as a profession with her father's support and experience, but she has had to hold on to her feminine qualities in order to achieve any power. It's her matriarchal qualities that are going to give her much more power.

Deering has come to a point in her life where she has enough money and wants to spend it on herself. So she uses artifice in the way women do when they have some money to play with. She gets her nails done. She gets her hair dyed. She probably has some Botox, although I haven't, so I'm sure my face doesn't quite look as if she does have, but I'm sure she would do! She makes the best of herself, and that's not me in real life. I'm someone that likes to walk about in tracksuit bottoms with a piece of string in my hair.

Any new Paul Abbott project is going to be interesting and you want to be a part of it. But for me it was much more than that - for me it was Paul's writing itself. It is very, very rich and is unusual writing in television. I believe he's a medieval mystic, a Julian of Norwich of television, because there's something completely un-pin-down-able about his writing.

The fact that I'm a writer has no bearing on any of this. I don't think I could pick up anyone else's script and think I could have a go at this. I think people have a voice when writing. The fact that I have experience in how you develop and write scripts is almost irrelevant. I can't think like Paul. Perhaps it helps me understand a bit about the mechanics about the scripts and how they go through the ringer until the moment that they get shot and even beyond into the edit. I think that gives you a sense of calm about the process because you know that it's subject to change. But I think within me there is a categorical distinction between being a writer and being an actor.

I see No Offence as bloody. It absolutely embodies a kind of visceral physical, emotional landscape. Yes there are the plots, but it's all about how you get there, not where you go. It's very bold and brave.